Becoming Folorunsho Alakija at 70

Africa’s Richest Woman, and Founder, FAMFA Oil, Apostle Folorunsho Alakija, who clocked 70 on Thursday, July 15, in this exclusive interview with Sunday Ehigiator, shared snippets of her journey from trials to fame and affluence

Tell us about your upbringing and shareable infant memories?

The meaning of my name is ‘God Protecter’ (Folorunso). And he has been doing that right from when I was in my mother’s womb. If it wasn’t for God, my mother wouldn’t have given birth to me. I thank God. I come from a polygamous home, from a family consisting of eight wives and 52 children. I am child number eight child to the glory of God.

Growing up, we learnt so much. At an early age of seven, my parents decided to send me and one of my siblings, who was six-year-old at the time, to boarding school in England. And that was a big change in my life. The weather wasn’t kind of course, for a little girl who has been in the sun for all her life and now had to wear winter coats and socks up to her knees. I did notot like the cold and still don’t like the cold. Then, you have to have your bath only once a week, which was the rule in boarding school.

Then coming back four years later as an 11-year-old, I remember one day, my mum sent me a letter to my dad who was having his siesta at home. She was in her shop, and I was in her shop. I had come back to Nigeria like six-months after, and she gave me this letter to go and give to my father. I got there, and he was sleeping. The mosquito net was down, and I woke him up. I said I had this letter for you and my mum wanted me to give it to you.

And he said; okay, why don’t you stick it in my mouth. And I lifted up the mosquito net and I stuck the letter in his mouth. Suddenly he got up. He was in a rage. He took his clothes brush, and he started to spank me with it. And I felt so bad. I felt that life had dealt a bad one on me, because I didn’t know what I did wrong.

He told me to put it in his mouth, and I put it in his mouth. I didn’t realise that he was only being sarcastic. And I cried all the way to my mum’s store and I told my mum what happened. She burst into laughter when I told her what happened. She called all the other retailers around and told them what happened, and they all burst out laughing, and I cried the most, because I didn’t know why they were all laughing. And I started saying, I want to go back to England, I am not staying here anymore. It took me a long time to realise what I did wrong.

What was your parent’s occupation?

My parents were textile retailers, and my father used to order textiles from Austria. He was a textile retailer. He would design them. He was a wholesaler, and my mum was one of his customers.

Tell me about your life as a fashion designer?

I studied fashion design in school. I went through school in England at the age of 11, came back to school here in Nigeria, started my A Levels in Nigeria, and went back to England. By that time that I went back I had been married and I went back to study fashion design. I have had all my children. My youngest was two-year-old at the time. I took him with me. The third one was in boarding school. His older brothers, number one and two were also in boarding school in England, so I went to England to study fashion designing.

I came back after some crash courses in fashion design and millenary to set up my fashion label here. Within three weeks of setting up, I had entered into a fashion competition. I had won the cup and it was a national competition.

I won the competition and that immediately threw me into the limelight. This history as we look back today was what launched me into the public limelight. I stopped designing when I was 50-year-old, that’s 20-year ago. And I transitioned from the fashion industry into the oil and industry.

What made you give up fashion and how did you get into the oil and gas industry?

First and foremost let me say, fashion is my passion. Sometime in 1991, I met a family friend of mine on the plane, and she said, “there is something I’ll like to talk to you about when we get back to Nigeria. If the person I asked to help me out with it hasn’t done it, I’ll ask you to help me out.”

So, we got back to Nigeria and she came knocking on my door, and gave me some big documents. She is a Lawyer, and then said she had some clients, and “we are looking to lift crude oil from Nigeria.”

She wanted to know whether I might be able to speak to some of my clients, one of whom was the late Mrs. Babangida. And I agreed to go and see her, and see if she can help.

I got there and she said, “Okay, I can book an appointment for you to see the Petroleum Minister.” And I went to see the Petroleum Minister, and what they wanted was to lift crude, but the Minister said, the current administration at that time really wanted to move away from that, and preferred to get more Nigerians involved in that, rather than giving that out to foreigners.

So he said if they want to invest in Nigeria, rather than come and lift Nigeria’s crude, then they will be willing to do that. I took it back to my friend and she took it back to her clients, and they said, “No we don’t want to invest in Nigeria, we only wanted to lift.”

So we parted ways. And I said to myself, now that I have an enroot to that place, why don’t I go find something I can do. All I wanted was a contract to boost my pocket. Though I still wanted to carry on with my fashion, I love it.

So, I asked Mrs. Babangida to please help me book another appointment. So I went back to see the minister, and I told him I was interested in finding something to do with NNPC.

He said okay; “why don’t you go and do your homework, and let’s see what we can do.” I went back, and went to see some friends who work with NNPC at that time, and I asked them “what can I possibly do or think I can do within NNPC.”

I was given all sorts of different options that are possibilities; catering for offshore workers, then maybe transporting crude from one location to another etc. So, I would sit down, write my letter, take it there, and ask Mrs. Babangida to help me meet the minister. Sometimes I have to wait for six months to get an appointment with the Minister. Sometimes, I have to wait for like four months.

And I would go back, but the minister would point holes in what I had come to offer. And I would return home dejected. And I would go back to do some more work, and I would get Mrs. Babangida to get another appointment for me.

So that went on. They were all no’s, which is one of the reasons I have made it one of my mantras to “never accept a no for an answer.”

Eventually, at the end of it all, the last thing the minister said to me was, “why don’t you think of exploration and production?”

And I thought, okay, I get it. He is trying to say no in a nice way. And he was like this is it, which means I can’t come back to this office to ask for anything else. Me! Exploration and production! We know the kind of people that are involved in that; little did I know that it was a move of God.

So, I came back home and I cried my eyes out. My husband comforted me. And I call Mrs. Babangida and told her what I came back with. And she said, well, all she knew was that that kind of thing takes years.” And we left it at that. And I carried on licking my wounds.

And then I woke up one day and said, no! I am not accepting that no. I am not going to allow that to just filter away. I said to myself, “Folorunso, what’s the matter with you. I thought you like challenges. Come on, do something about this. What’s there to lose?”

We were comfortable; we had a block of eight flats at the back of the house and our own individual house in front. Our children all abroad, we were comfortable. We were okay, I was running my fashion business and I loved it.

So I decided that I was going to go back. So I called Mrs. Babangida and I said, “Please, I would like to ask you to please book me one more appointment with the minister.” And she did. She was very kind.

But that was all that Mrs. Babangida did concerning this oil license matter. She kept on getting me those appointments. And the rest was what God wanted to do.

What he wanted to do at first by giving me that opening through my friend because I wouldn’t have looked towards the oil industry. And that’s how God works. He doesn’t come down, he uses people.

So I went back and I said to the minister that I wanted to see if I could do this, and I really want to apply for it.

And she said okay, “You go and do your homework, because its Nigerians that the government of the day wants to encourage now.

We have had a lot of multinationals over the years, we want to encourage Nigerians, and we want our resources and wealth to be retained in our own land rather than have it carted away by foreigners all the time.”

So, I applied for the license three times. And that took three years. The Ministers changed hands twice within the process. And it was during the time of the last minister that I eventually got it.

I remembered I was abroad and I was watching General Babangida on CNN, when he was saying that he was stepping down. I remember that, each time the ministers changed hands, I burst into tears again. Because, it was like snakes and ladders. It was like starting all over again.

It was a case of discretionary allocation at the time. The President, through the NNPC, was the one that would decide who gets it. I think I was one of the first women to get the license. It’s very painful when you listen to people say that “oh! It’s because she makes blouses for Mrs. Babangida or Oh! It’s because she was one of them.”

How about all the others who got the license, and weren’t in the oil industry at the time that they got the license? So because they are men, they have two heads? Is it fair on womanhood? Why relegate us to the background. Why say we can’t when we can? When all the prerequisites, the boxes could be ticked?

Everything that I needed to do, to supply before I could qualify to apply for a license or get one, I made them all available; our technical partners etc. I went here and there, I got everything, and I supplied everything.

I did my homework. I learnt on the job, went for courses as well to help me to be able to sit in board rooms, and face others, and be where I am today, to His glory.

Now we got that license and when it came, I went to find out about it, and I realised that it was an oil block that nobody wanted. Nobody in the industry wanted it. It was deep offshore. It was 5,000 feet deep, and technology had not reached that water depth. It was too expensive to explore.

And nobody knew what was deep under. Only God knew the blessings therein, and he closed the eyes of every human being on earth to it. And as I always say, that the stone the builders rejected, became the chief cornerstone.

So it took another three years, after getting the license, before I was able to get technical partners, because nobody wanted it.

The first door I knocked on was a multinational company that was right next to us on the plan. I said, would you like to partner with us please, and they said, “No! We were allocated that block, and we returned it, because it was just not going to happen. There was no point, where do you start from? We returned it.” And they said no, we don’t want to partner with you.

Three years down the line, Texaco came knocking. There was maybe a bit more technology improvement, and they were willing to look into that block and invited us for a meeting. We had meetings for three months before we eventually signed.

Before we signed however, those neighbours who had said no came back running saying, “we are interested!” And we told them no! Sorry, it’s too late.

Because we had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Texaco who had said, “If anything happens while we are still negotiating, we want to hear.”

So we were obliged to tell them that Statoil had come knocking on our door, and they said “no, no, no! Don’t talk to them.” So Statoil said to us, we will do this and that for you; you know what we did with that? We were armed with all the promises they made, and we used that against Texaco to negotiate for more. It was God.

So you got the license, but it was for an oil block that nobody wanted, how did you feel at that moment?

I cried my eyes out again. But I knew that we had nothing to lose. Because what we could pay for at the time was the smaller amount that we were obliged to pay to the government. We could afford to pay those as a family.

But the bigger amount that we needed to pay the government, we were waiting until we got technical partners. When we got technical partners, they did pay. Shortly after that, we found oil in commercial quantities, and the rest is history today.

Forbes 2020 recognised you as the richest woman in Africa, what does this mean to you?

I don’t say that I am, it’s people that say that. I don’t know what’s in other people’s pockets. There may be others who have more, you never know, because they aren’t saying or doing anything. But I thank God who has brought me this far. How does it make you feel? It gives you some more comfort, but it doesn’t do everything that you want in life.

Money comes and goes; you have to look after it. That’s how my parents brought us up. One of the values that they instilled in us is that you have to look after money. If you look after it, then it will look after you, and it will stay with you, otherwise it will flee from you.

It’s good to have, and it’s good to be able to use it to help others who don’t have it, because our fingers are not equal. God did say that we will always have the poor with us, and it’s because of the poor that he also created rooms for those who have more, so we can always be our brother’s keeper.

So it’s a good thing to be able to have something to use to help others, but not the only way that one could help others. You can encourage and teach them what you know or other types of comfort, not necessarily money. But money is something that’s good to have, everybody wants it.

How do you maintain your status being the Africa richest woman?

I know that the more you give the more God gives back to you. But that shouldn’t be the reason why you should give. It mustn’t be your motives. There is a scripture that says when you give; it shall be giving back to you in good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.

So it’s standard, there are many if’s in the bible among which is, if you give, it shall be given back to you. It’s one of those ifs, you don’t do it because that’s what you want to achieve; you should do it because it’s the will of God for you to give. He wants you to give, and he wants you to do so willingly. So that’s it for me.

What inspired Rose of Sharon Foundation and where is it right now?

I own a store on High Street, and I used to have a lot of people walking in, asking for help, and I used to help them. And I thought that there should be a better way to do it more effectively.

So I asked God if there is a particular area or areas he would like me to help him. You know as Christians, we really shouldn’t be going to God saying I want this or that all the time, we should also ask God, what can I do for you today?

So on such an occasion, I decided to take it to the Lord in prayers. I told him I want to say thank you for how far you have brought me, what can I do for you? And he gave me James 1:27. I have never read that before. I turned to it immediately and I found that he was sending me to widows and orphans, and their children, to look after them and their plights. From that day on, I have never looked back.

For me, it was a commandment. When God tells me to jump, I ask how high he wants me to go, and I’ll just do it with all my energy and all I’ve got. But, all that time, even before then, I have always reached out to people who were around me. Because that is how we are in Nigeria. We are givers, we do love one another.

That’s our own way of philanthropy. We have never had a proper or organised philanthropy, but we have had those other ones, but today, we are now trivialising them.

So I have always given consistently, I was now able to increase that and then came a time some people were thinking, is it only widows that she helps, and because I don’t want you to lose your husband before I can help you, I decided to set up Flourish Africa for Women.

Africans have to flourish. We need to flourish. I am a woman, so let me start there. So Flourish Africa is in its fifth year. And we will be making a big announcement on the occasion of my birthday.

As the pandemic struck, you were one of the biggest donors, tell us how that happened?

You know, FAMFA Oil is a family business; I am not the only one in it. It’s all of us. My husband, our children, that’s where we all are.

When that need became daring, we felt we can’t just watch our fellow citizens drop dead without doing anything about it. The government didn’t have the money, and the private sector had come up with CACOVID.

They had written to FAMFA but we haven’t received the letter, so we had sat down and tried to work out which agencies we wanted to reach out to and how we wanted to do this.

We found out that, if we did it that way, it was going to require a lot of logistics, a lot of planning, and we have to delve into areas that we are not conversant with.

So we reached out to CACOVID, and they said, oh! They had written to us. But we didn’t get the letter, because they had sent the letter to the office, and we have closed down our offices. As of now, we still have not reopened our offices since March last year, everybody is working from home.

So it’s now that our staff goes there to pick up our mails, that we saw the letter that CACOVID had written to us.

So we got talking, and we told them we would like to make a donation, which is a billion Naira. But we would like to be sure that when we do make the donations to CACOVID, it’s going to get to the right quarters, which are the areas we would like to see our money go. So they said okay, we can join the meetings. That’s how I started attending the meeting on behalf of our company, and the rest is history.

How were you able to ensure the money went to the right places?

As I said, I was part of the meetings, and we were discussing these things every Monday morning. Reports were being tendered, and accounts were being tendered, and decisions were being made in-house by ourselves, as to how we want to do it.

The donations were throughout all the state of Nigeria we sent palliatives to. We got tents for the temporary hospitals, the ones that had fixed walls and already existing, we partnered with their owners. It was all very clean and straightforward.

Congratulations as you turn 70, what does life mean to you at 70?

You know, I don’t feel 70 in my heart. I thank God that it isn’t showing, from what people tell me. It’s not by my power or might but through his grace, and not because of anything I have done special.

But then, 70 solid years are flown by. I didn’t realize that I could sit here and talk about 70 so quickly. And I look back now, and I can say nothing to regret, except that I didn’t come to Christ earlier, which was almost 30 years ago. That’s my only regret in life.

I am not saying that everything has been perfect. It has been a rollercoaster. When there are deeps, you learn from the deeps, from the challenges you’ve had to face, from the lessons that have come out of it. You have to run with it, make good use of it so that you can come back and encourage others with what you have learnt as a result of the tribulations you had to face.

Whatever it is, nothing is ever on a bed of roses without feeling the thorns. Roses are lovely to look at but not to sleep on, because the thorns will crush you.

So turning 70, I thank God that every season, every turn of events and the milestone I have had to go through, I can look back now and say I thank God.

I have placed boxes in front of God and been able to thick them; I have focused on other things and am still able to thick those as well. I thank him because at every turn of events, I can feel his presence.

I can always see him; I can always touch him, because I see the things that he has done. I see the outcome in the physical not just the spiritual, and I know that this wasn’t me. It had to be God.

As you turned 70, what would you regard as your greatest achievement in life?

Giving my life to Christ at the age of 40 has been the greatest thing God has given me the opportunity to do. Knowing him brought about a big turn of events in my life.

God is our guard and has given us the bible. Something we can hold in the physical. That we can read. That can work for us. He gave us Jesus over 2000 years ago, and his blood works for everything.

I call him the miracle walker in the sense that; you know how you look at Moringa, which is called the miracle seed. Everything that comes out of the Moringa tree is extremely useful for one thing or the other.

The miracle healer, that’s how I like to liken the blood of Jesus. He used it to redeem us, reconcile us, forgive us, deliver us, and also bless us. All we need to do is to open our eyes to what we already have.

Many people don’t see it. Many Christian don’t know it, and yet it’s written there in the bible. Many struggle with it because maybe something they asked for couldn’t happen overnight. Maybe because they are impatient with God, but he is our God and provider who makes everything manifest at the right time into our lives.

What he wants you to archive is different from what he wants me to achieve in life. You have to find out what your purpose in life is. And the only way to find that out is to ask him in prayers. We all have our individual talents where we have grace to prosper without difficulty or struggling too much.

When did you become an Apostle?

I became an Apostle last year. In a week, it will be a year. I thank God it was through God’s call, and his revelation. It had come two years ago. I was ordained but I didn’t use the title. I wanted more confirmation. I wanted to be fully convinced. So confirmation came from all angles eventually for about six or seven days, that was when I accepted to go along with it.

Aside from being an Apostle and the richest woman in Africa, tell us something people don’t really know about you?

I love spending time with my grandchildren just as my husband also does. Family is everything. You have to create time for family, not just work all the time.

You also must create time for God and those that don’t fall into the family, business and God categories. That is the others, because no man can make a forest, but in our collectivity, we can achieve the best of life. We can’t do without one another.

What are your career mantras?

I have lots of mantras. First is, never settle for no. Keep trying till you get a yes. Another one of my favorites is, anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well, which is why I always want to go the extra mile.

I encourage others to do the same, because, when you do that, more often than not, it’s always a yes at the end of the tunnel. It’s always a green light or something positive at the end of the tunnel.

You may have gone through challenges and tribulations, but because you didn’t give up or allowed a no to keep you down or keep you back, you will achieve your aim and purpose, and even more for that matter.

What’s your advice to youth and entrepreneurs in this ‘make it quick’ generation?

For those who want to get wealth quickly, it’s not the way to go. It gets people into trouble. If you want to do it very fast, you will end up cutting corners. And when you cut corners, you are going to regret it more often than not. I will say 95 per cent of the time, you are going to regret it, or live to regret it.

I will say slow and steady wins the race, because as you are going slowly, you are planning, you are applying what you have planned, you are applying wisdom, asking questions and putting the answers into this cooking board, just like you want to cook and want it to be a very delicious food at the end of the day.

But when you are just throwing in everything, and want the best result to come out of it, you didn’t do it the right way nor the appropriate way, you will get into bad company most likely. You will make rash decisions because you were in too much of a hurry.

You didn’t give yourself enough time to think it through. You are dealing with flashes in pans. You are not going through the tried and tested methods. It’s not worth it at the end of the day. Maybe only two per cent are able to say I did it following the fast lane. And as they’ve done it, oftentimes there may be repercussions. So it is better to do it the way it’s supposed to be done so that you won’t regret it.

Finally, how would you like to be remembered?

That woman that feared God! I will always be who I am and who I was from the beginning. I always say that there is no amount of money that can change me. What can continue to change us is when you develop a relationship continuously with God. God will continue to change you and continue to mould you to his standard.